Pastelland Forum

Vurn wrote:Pretty sure that what you're talking about is actually called nonconcantenative morphology

I think we just learned different words for the same phenomenon. I definitely had this exact same thing taught to me as templatic morphology in a university-level linguistics class. Your word seems like it fits better with other words for morphologies though; it seems like a much more scientific term.

Vurn wrote:It's an analytic language, as far as I know, for which the concept of a morpheme doesn't even exist, because inflection doesn't exist.

I might just be getting picky with semantics here, but as I learned it this wouldn't eliminate the concept of the morpheme, it would just mean that each word is exactly one morpheme.

sometimes I like to get picky with semantics

Nonconcatenative morphology is wider than the vowel patterns around consonant roots, it is an umbrella term that covers all meaningful changes to the word that don't add apparent morphemes. Take English foot > feet, which is nonconcatenative too. From ablaut to Finnish consonant gradation, things fall under it in most languages.

I do believe you messed up the terminology a bit with polysynthetic morphology, perhaps agglutinative or concatenative would work. Polysynthetic belongs into that spectrum, but it is so far in the extreme of "all the morphemes, please" that the boundaries between a word and a sentence become blurry. The Inuit languages have this feature, English certainly does not.English has a fair share of morphemes, don't get me wrong, You Are on the modestest end of the concatenative scale. Which really is a terminological mess.

On the other hand there is the scale of agglutinative to inflectional, which is about how mushed together the morphemes are. E.g. Finnish has separate morphemes for person, tense and mood, but Spanish crams those into a single one (through historical sound processes). But then there is the scale from isolating to polysynthetic e.g. Chinese to Inuktikut. Concatenative vs nonconcatenative is just Another spectrum to divide morphologies With.

It's been like six months since I learned about this stuff and I'm going off memory, so I guess I had forgotten about the term "agglutinative." Thanks for correcting me. As much as I like linguistics, my knowledge is fairly limited; I have taken one class on it and it was an introductory one, and I don't even know any language other than English (and a more or less unusable amount of German). Next fall I'm taking Chinese and another linguistics class, so we'll see how that goes

zombyrus wrote:It's been like six months since I learned about this stuff and I'm going off memory, so I guess I had forgotten about the term "agglutinative." Thanks for correcting me. As much as I like linguistics, my knowledge is fairly limited; I have taken one class on it and it was an introductory one, and I don't even know any language other than English (and a more or less unusable amount of German). Next fall I'm taking Chinese and another linguistics class, so we'll see how that goes

I haven't really recieved any formal training either, I was just interested in it and read and listened to quite a lot of stuff. Last summer I had a huge etymology binge and that is why I know about yarasa being derived from jar- in Proto-Turkic or that 'ōpe'ape'a in Hawaiian and pekapeka in Maori derive from the same stem *peka in Proto-Polynesian. Or that Russia probably comes from an old Swedish word for to row. Stuff like that.

Study binges are fun.

zombyrus wrote:
I might just be getting picky with semantics here, but as I learned it this wouldn't eliminate the concept of the morpheme, it would just mean that each word is exactly one morpheme.

sometimes I like to get picky with semantics

Well, sure, you could analyze it like that. Take the Mandarin word zhongguoren (there should be tone marks in the pinyin transcription, but I'm too lazy to look them up and add them) which means a person from China (English doesn't really have a special word for that, does it?) which is made up of the words zhong, 中, meaning middle, guo, 国, meaning country - both together meaning China - and ren, 人, meaning person. All those function as words on their own, alright. I guess what I was trying to say is that Chinese - or Mandarin at least, since that I know the most about - doesn't have morphemes that aren't words on their own. In Japanese, the same three characters put together - 中国人 - would mean the same thing, but be read chūgokujin, and while all those three characters in isolation would be read, respectively, naka, kuni and hito (and mean the same), chū- is only a prefix that means middle or center, -koku is a suffix meaning country, and -jin is a 'person' suffix, none of these function as words on their own.

I can confirm all this.

"zhōngguórén" 中国人
I suppose a less used way of putting it in English would just be 'Chinaman', but really?

So how are you planning to use this knowledge later in life, o Linguist?

Chinaman is usually considered derogatory, though, while the Chinese and Japanese terms are neutral.

Boingo wrote: So how are you planning to use this knowledge later in life

uh no idea honestly, getting a job somewhere in that field sounds great though i don't have the slightest idea what i could actually do
though studying it on a university is rather appealing

I could use some help actually.
I don't know a thing about the Latin language. So I ask if someone could give the English translation of this Latin phrase: Ex Libris

from the books?